PADUA, Italy -- Professor Giuseppe Colombo, Italy's leading space scientist and consultant to the U.S. space agency, died of an incurable ailment in a Padua hospital Monday, doctors announced. He was 63.
A hospital spokesman said Colombo died Monday in the Padua hospital where he was taken more than a month ago. Doctors said he had been suffering for 18 months from 'an incurable ailment,' a term usually used in Italy for cancer.
Colombo, born in Padua on Oct. 2, 1920 was the only Italian to hold a medal from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for exceptional results in space research.
His most famous project, taken up by NASA, was for a 'tethered' satellite -- a satellite to be attached to the American space shuttle, or some other autonomous space ship by a leash up to 60 miles long.
This would enable it to be used for space research in regions of the atmosphere where autonomous satellites could not remain in orbit.
NASA plans to put the 'tethered' satellite into operation in 1987, Italian officials said.
Colombo became internationally known in the early 1960s when he established that the planet Mercury rotated on its own axis once in every 55 days, while its orbit around the sun takes 88 days.
Previously scientists believed Mercury rotated only once during its 88-day orbit.
Because of this disovery, NASA changed the program for Mercury 10 to make it pass around the planet three times instead of only once as originally planned.
Colombo started his career as a professor at the Padua university engineering faculty from 1944 to 1955. He went on to teach at the universities of Catania, Modena and Genoa.
But in 1962 he returned to Padua University to teach the mechanics of machine vibration, a post he held until his death.
He had been a consultant to NASA since 1960 and since then spent around six months of each year in the United States, working at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
He was closely involved in the launching of the European spacecraft Giotto, which was launched during the recent pass of Halley's comet.
Scientists from all over the world, including many from the United States, were expected to attend Colombo's funeral on Friday at Padua cathedral. Colombo left a widow and two grown children.
